Content Outline

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Learning Objectives

1. Recognize the author’s descriptions of sanity; how feelings are dealt with in our healing systems, and how important bodily and emotional feelings are for healing and wellness.
2. Define “internalized stressor” and communicate the benefits of “body-focused therapy.”
3. Identify the biology of memory, the three levels of the human brain, and how these each contribute to “body memory.”
4. Distinguish between psychological, physiological, and structural tension in yourself and your clients.
5. Recognize the possibility of elements of fragmented feelings in your own and your client’s experience.
6. Describe how to center yourself in a therapeutic mindset that carries healing intent through your touch.
7. Recognize the boundaries and connectedness between psychological, physiological, and structural tension in yourself and your clients.
8. Identify strategies for a bodywork treatment plan that includes awareness of your client’s feelings and/or life context.
9. Identify the professional roles and boundaries for a bodywork treatment plan that interfaces with body-focused psychotherapy.
10. Achieve at least 70% correct on the course test.

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Sample text

"The human body structurally demonstrates the fundamental and natural necessity for boundary-setting as a means of sustaining health, especially in two locales: the skin and the immune system. The skin is both our outermost organ and the site of physical contact with the world, marks where the self ends and the "outer" world beings. Also known as the "integument," it functions as the built-in delineator of our separateness and our integrity as individuals. When someone touches us lovingly and appropriately, we feel soothed, stimulated, "in touch", and connected. Gentle touch not only elicits a cascade of mood altering endorphins and the relaxation response ot make us feel good, it also triggers the skin to release thymopoeitan, a hormone which bolsters our immune competence by stimulating maturing immune cells. When someone touches us without our permission we feel "invaded" and "violated," and our fight-or-flight response kicks in, along with a gush of stress hormones, aborted digestion, elevated blood pressure, and increase muscle tension. Negative contact with the world is an emergency." (Deep Feeling, Deep Healing by Andy Bernay-Roman LMHC, NCC, MS, RN, LMT, 2001, p. 69)

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Sample test question

The necessity for intact boundaries, as vital to the integrity of the entire organism, is best reflected in which two parts of the human anatomy?

1. cell wall and mucous membranes
2. hair follicles and fingernails
3. the skin and the immune system
4. the blood and lymph

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